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mother’s left shoulder stood the other sister, holding her body still, making her shoulders an apologetic curve to keep the family from fighting till the photographer, probably no gentleman, had done his work.
    The second photograph showed Caroline on the deck of a ship, laughing with her sister, who looked cold. You could see Caroline thought it a joke, her sister’s coldness, she would make her walk the deck a hundred times. The third picture was Caroline beside a car, clearly her treasure. A stout leg peeked uncomfortably beneath a modern skirt. In the last photograph Caroline stood with her son, looking reluctant and about to walk away. And Stephen’s eyes looked off, with the attitude of someone always ready to accept reproach.
    “I will prevail over Papa; I will not relent,” Caroline had written at twenty. And she had done it: had not relented, had prevailed. What was that hard shining thing in the center of Caroline Watson that had never lodged in Anne? All her life she’d been a good girl; all her life she had been pleasing. At the center of her was not something hard and brilliant, but something soft and flat. But as she thought of Caroline, read the diary, looked at the photographs, above all when she thought about the paintings, something embedded itself, dug in, and sharpened. Caroline entered her life. Intrusive, overwhelming, siphoning attention, like a new lover, she entered and took over. She cast her light on everything and colored it, or revealed it as bleak. And, like a lover, she was the vehicle of infidelity, for as Anne felt her longing turn toward Caroline she felt herself more and more distant from Michael. And she felt his perception of her distance, as if he were on a ship anchored at shore, watching her sail out to sea, small, fading out, away from him. It had happened before; it happened, she imagined, in all good marriages, this sailing in and out of intimacy, this removal to a private realm. For privacy, she felt, was one of the important benefits of marriage. It was much easier to have privacy in a marriage than as a single woman; there was time for it, and time to come back out of it, a place to come back to. It didn’t rip the curtain through; it didn’t bring the house down.
    But something new had happened. She wasn’t sailing now; she was rowing away. She felt the strain against her heart as she pushed harder to be farther and more certainly away. And one night, as she lay awake while Michael slept, she knew that whether she took the job or not, the way she felt about her family had changed. If she didn’t take it, she would continue rowing away from them. If she did, she would become different in her relation to them. She would have done something daring, something perhaps shocking. It would be the first time in her life that she had shocked.
    How had she become the woman she was? At thirty-eight, never to have performed a daring action. She was tired of it, tired of the weakness that had marked her life. She thought of Caroline at twenty, defying her father to study abroad, leaving her child ten months of the year. Unwomanly, they would have called her, but was that what people meant, had always meant, by womanliness—mere submission?
    So the talks began, first tentative, then daily changing tone: tearful, unfriendly, lacerating, hurt, apologetic, pleading, blandishing, rational, cold. Pictures were created: think of the sunsets, the olive trees, the children in the square. Think of them among French children, speaking French. Think of us walking among the cypresses. But in the end, it was Michael who said to her that they must do it, that it was mostly fear that kept them back. And Caroline, this work, was too important to lose because they lacked courage. Of course they would do it, they both said, as if their indecision had been merely good form, a gesture proffered to a hostile universe so as not to appear, before its punitive gaze, too confident. People did it all the